The transmission of caller identification (hereafter called caller ID) is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,582,956 of C. A. Doughty. Initially, the caller ID information was simply displayed on an alphanumeric display which was often a separate unit from the telephone. U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,145 of B. C. Lim discloses a telephone that is responsive to the caller ID information to either spell, speak, or display the name of the caller. Voice synthesis is utilized to convert the digital data representing the name of the caller into the audio output. U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,145 clearly allows greater utilization of the caller ID information since it is no longer necessary for the called party to have to be physically close enough to read an alphanumeric display to know the identity of the caller. However, to answer the telephone call in U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,145, it is necessary for the called party to physically pick up the telephone handset in order to talk to the calling party. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,899,358 and 5,007,076 of J. R. Blakely also disclose the conversion of the digital data representing the caller ID into an audio representation of the name of the caller.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,095 of M. A. Borcherding discloses a telephone that is responsive to voice commands to initiate dialing and to determine the correct telephone number to be dialed. This patent illustrates the problems associated with a telephone recognizing voice commands. Namely, the cost of doing voice recognition. As pointed out in this patent, two approaches to speech recognition have evolved: speaker dependent and speaker independent. U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,095 utilizes both approaches in order to reduce costs and increase reliability. The speaker independent approach is utilized to recognize the initial commands to start dialing and then the spoken name or telephone is recognized by using the speaker dependent approach. As U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,095 points out, the speaker dependent approach suffers from high costs and the problems associated in training the voice recognition unit. U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,095 does allow the recognition of voice commands; however, it is an expensive and difficult system to utilize.
The prior art does allow limited hands-free operations of a telephone both in recognizing a caller and for placing a call. What is needed is greater flexibility in using voice commands to answer calls yet use simple, inexpensive, voice recognition techniques while still allowing the capability to respond to different callers in different ways.